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As a beginner, how should I go about learning difficult concepts?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Programming
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It's a lot to take in at first, but the problem isn't that you're really doing something wrong or that you're lacking some piece of information. You just need to actually write more code. It will help you understand why something is set up the way that it is, and also help things make a lot more sense. Once you have that foundation of experience, a lot of other things fall into place on their own for lack of a better explanation. In other words: practice makes perfect
How long would you say it took you before getting a fundamental understanding? I ask because I've been at this on and off for years but I always end up quitting because after a few months I just don't see any progress happening. I'm still forgetting things I learned 3 or even 4 times like how to do a for each loop.
But as you said it just takes practice. I've tried to find challenges that I could do and everything is just so overwhelming I have idea where to start. I see tutorials say to make a tic tac toe game or a calculator or to contribute to open source code. Which is good I suppose but all of it feels too advanced and I get lost on how to begin. For reference I'm currently learning html, css, and JavaScript. Advent of code was okay when I tried but once I got past the first handful of challenges it quickly went way over my head with sorting algorithms and how to make maps out lists for the elves to move or whatever.
I have been programming for decades now and still have to look up how an if statement works in bash - or other similar things, especially when switching between languages. It takes 5 seconds to look up and remember so I would not bother worrying about it. Far better to know when you need to use an if or for loop and quickly look up the syntax then to know the syntax but not when to use it.
Break problems down into simpler problems, then break those down into simpler problems until you have a trivial problem you can solve. Then build up from there. Like take a tic tac toe game - lots of things to consider that can all be dealt with in isolation. Like rendering the game to the screen, that is one problem you can start with, and can be broken down even further to maybe how to draw a grid to the screen, which again can be broken down to how to draw a box or line.
You might even want to look at the book " Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving by V. Anton Spraul" which goes into this way of thinking in more detail.